State of The Union of Gaming – Games Need a Hook

First off, I’d like to apologize for the delay between my articles, as I know you all look forward to them (because they are amazing and sexy), but I’ve been busy. But anyway I’ve decided to write one, of perhaps many articles, entitled “State of The Union of Gaming” in which I talk about, at whatever length I please, the failures or success (but lets be honest here, this is Negative Gamer so it will mostly be failures) of Video Games. Video Games are a cruel mistress, I tell you.

On to the meaty part! As a young child I was so engrossed in JRPGs (Japanese Role Playing Games) it was disgusting. That’s all I would play. Toiling away for 80, 90, 100+ hours at a single game just to work through what was quite often, a shitty plot. Now maybe it’s just because I’m older and I don’t have the time to invest or maybe the genre just needs a face lift, but I cannot stand JRPGs anymore. For instance, I just started playing Star Ocean: The Last Hope and I played it for about 20 minutes. After that 20 minutes I was so deathly bored of the game that I shut it off and decided to write my latest NG article.

What was the problem? Nothing in that game grabbed my attention. You start on a space ship after World War III, blah blah blah, crash land on a planet. It’s the same old story and the same old game. I know it’s a situation where “you need to be patient” but I don’t have the patience for that anymore. If a game doesn’t get me emotionally attached in the first 20 minutes, I probably won’t care to play it any longer. I should clarify by “Game” I mean RPG. For instance, the best RPG in quite some time is Lost Odyssey. I loved that game. Within 5 minutes of popping that first disc into my Xbox I knew this game would be amazing. Why? Because you started out strong. They did something different.

I could go on and on about how much I loved Lost Odyssey, but that’s not the point of this article. The gaming industry needs to learn something from all of the other mediums. You need a hook. You need something that immediately grasps the readers’, watchers’, or players’ attention and has them craving more. Until you do that, eastern developers, you will remain on my “ignore” list of gaming.